


They've Given You A Number And Taken Away Your Name

by thatdamneddame



Series: They've Given You A Number And Taken Away Your Name [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, M/M, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, canon off screen character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-07
Updated: 2013-11-07
Packaged: 2017-12-31 18:10:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1034789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatdamneddame/pseuds/thatdamneddame
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Skye doesn't know all that much about Agent Coulson, but she is almost a hundred percent certain that he's not a fembot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	They've Given You A Number And Taken Away Your Name

**Author's Note:**

> Tagged as a canon AU because this sucker got fairly jossed last light with the airing of episode 6. Oh well, we all knew this day would come.
> 
> Title comes from "Secret Agent Man" by Johnny Rivers because I couldn't help myself. Yeah, baby, yeah.
> 
> Thanks, as always, to prettyasadiagram for the beta and life coaching. Also for some pretty stellar song suggestions. You know what you did.

Agent Coulson likes old things and he gave Skye a second chance—keeps giving her second chances even though she keeps blowing them—and that’s all she knows about him. And honestly, that’s all that she needs to know.

It’s not like she knows that much more about everyone else on the Bus anyways.

 

***

 

“Enough with talking it out,” Melinda declares one night, Coulson safely tucked away into his office. “We’re going to drink this out.” She pours out five glasses of what Skye sincerely hopes is whiskey with the same efficiency that she picks locks and shoots guns and calls Coulson on his bullshit.

Skye thinks that Ward’s going to be the party pooper here, like he is every other time human interaction is required, but he actually accepts his glass from Melinda without complaint. “I was wondering when you were going to get sick of Coulson’s way.”

Melinda snorts. “When has success ever made a good team?” Ward smiles like it’s some sort of universal truth and seriously, _seriously_ , Skye is so not cut out for this super spy business.

“What about Agent Coulson?” Simmons asks, taking a glass and elbowing Fitz to do the same.

Melinda doesn’t frown because Melinda doesn’t do emotion other than incredibly down-to-earth or incredibly terrifying, and neither of those require anything more than a small smile or the world’s best poker face. But she does take a sip from her own glass like she thinks Simmons is crazy. “This isn’t about Coulson,” Melinda says. “This is about us.”

Ward raises his glass and Skye thinks for the eight billionth time how unfair it is that he has those arms and that jaw and that sliver of abs showing from where his shirt rides up from his too tight jeans, because for a guy that can be such an enormous toolbag, he’s kind of sweet and kind of funny. “I’ll drink to that,” he says, before taking a swallow.

Fitz and Simmons smile at each other and take their own tentative sips.

“Cheers.” Skye follows. You only live once, right?

 

***

 

“I just don’t know why you didn’t tell us,” Fitz whines, brogue turning near indecipherable with the addition of alcohol.

Simmons rubs his back consolingly. “There, there, Fitz. It doesn’t matter now. It all worked out.”

Skye still feels awkward and shitty about how the whole Rising Tide and Miles thing turned out, even though Coulson somehow managed to convince Ward to give her a second chance. But honestly, she didn’t really think that it would hurt Fitz and Simmons as much as it did. She didn’t realize that when you get stuck in the van enough together (and run off the road by a hijacked part-robot ex-spy), then you inevitably become friends or a team or something like that. Skye hasn’t had a lot of friends, ever, in her life so she forgot how it worked.

She opens her mouth to begin a slightly drunken _we don’t actually know each other all that well and my childhood was sort of fucked up_ apology speech but Melinda beats her to it. “Skye messed up,” Melinda spares her one terrifying glance that quells any feeling of thanks blooming in Skye, “but she wasn’t holding back deliberately. None of us know anything about each other’s lives outside the bus.”

Ward frowns into his drink. “That’s not true. We know about Fitz’s twin brother. And Simmons’ terrifying crush on Tony Stark.”

Simmons sputters, “I do _not_ have a crush on him. I simply admire his intellect and tenacity,” while Skye gapes in horror at the idea of two Fitz’s existing in the world.

Melinda turns her terrifying gaze onto Ward, looking thoroughly unimpressed by his lack of people skills. “I meant outside of their files, Ward.”

Ward shrugs, clearly not even bothering to give a fuck. “Does it matter?”

“Aren’t we all friends?” Fitz asks a bit desperately. Alcohol apparently makes him clingy. Skye swears to never let him drink again.

“Shouldn’t we know more about each other?” Simmons continues, clearly more capable of holding her drink. “Honestly, Fitz, you’re a Scottish disgrace. Sit up, you’re giving my leg pins and needles.”

Fitz slumps over to the other side of the couch. “We’re all we have. I’d like to think that we’re all friends.”

Which is depressing and middle school enough to prompt Skye into saying, “What do you want to do? Play some of those crappy school ice breaker games? Two truths and a lie?”

“You’re trapped on a desert island and you can only bring three songs?” Simmons suggests with a smile.

“‘Bugle Call Rag,’ ‘Duquesne Whistle,’ and ‘Where Have All the Cowboys Gone’,” Agent Coulson answers, appearing in the doorway suddenly enough to startle a small yelp out of Fitz.

Coulson’s looking at them—varying levels of drunk, sprawled across the furniture in the common room—like he can’t decide to yell about this or not. It’s too late now, but everyone sort of shuffles their glasses away like they just got caught drinking by their mom on a school night. Well, except for Melinda who just takes another sip like she’s daring Coulson to say something. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a Paula Cole fan.”

“I like the classics.” Coulson shrugs. “If a call comes in tomorrow I expect all of you to be at your best.” He says, clearly deciding that their hangovers will be suffering enough. “Goodnight everyone.” Coulson leaves as quickly and quietly as he came and everyone takes a deep breath.

Simmons is the one who speaks first. “What about Coulson then? What do we know about him?”

“Besides how he’s the reason we’re all here, you mean?” Ward asks. “He’s our boss and he’s Level Seven, need to know only. We don’t get to know anything about him.”

“ _You’re_ Level Seven,” Skye points out.

“I’m not Phil Coulson,” Ward argues, like it makes a difference, and maybe in his robot mind it does. But as far as Skye’s concerned, super spook is super spook, and Fitz and Simmons are nodding like they’re thinking the same thing as her.

“Why don’t we worry about each other first?” Melinda suggests. “Since Coulson’s not here right now to defend his terrible desert island song selection.”

“I don’t know, ‘Where Have All the Cowboys Gone’ is a classic,” Ward says, entirely straight faced. And it’s enough to get everyone laughing and the conversation going again, away from Skye and her past mistakes. Away from Coulson, the man who brought them all together but who no one knows anything about.

 

***

 

Coulson’s her boss; they don’t need to be all buddy-buddy.

Instead Skye gets into a prank war with Fitz, Melinda teaches her a few moves to try out on an unsuspecting Ward and Simmons is apparently the world champion of online shopping (“Not that it matters. No one will deliver to a top-secret plane. Oh, but that’s a nice top.”).

They’re all friends, or friendly, or friends-ish, at least, and Coulson has stopped corralling them together after missions to yell about unit cohesion, so Skye figures that’s a good thing. There’s a trust there that comes not with just saving each other’s lives but through actually _knowing_ each other. Skye’s never really had that before. She thought she knew Miles and look how that turned out.

So no one really knows that much about Coulson, but Skye knows she can trust him and she has a team, and really, that’s good enough for her.

 

***

 

They go on two weeks of shore leave.

“It’s only just been six months, sir,” Ward says, clearly confused. He’d explained the traditional shore leave schedule to Skye just the other day.

Coulson clenches his jaw, clearly in no mood for a fight.

“Is this about—” Melinda asks.

“ _Yes_.” Coulson snaps, not letting her finish. Then regaining his composure, he continues, “Director Fury gave me complete control over this team, and as a team we’ve had a near one hundred percent success rate. There are no pressing missions at hand, so instead of waiting until the designated leave time and perhaps finding ourselves in the middle of a new operation, I’ve decided that we’ll just take our leave now. It’s a vacation, guys; stop analyzing it.” And then because Coulson clearly understands that his team of hand picked deviants can never leave well enough alone, he makes a swift retreat into his office.

“Yes, but,” Simmons is left saying to the empty space where Coulson used to be, “but why _Iowa_.”

 

***

 

Skye does not stay in Iowa. She books it to New York as fast as she can and spends two weeks eating noodles in the seediest restaurants she can find. No one shoots at her and no one almost dies and Skye in no way commits accidental treason. It is, by all accounts, a pretty great vacation.

 

***

 

In a move that surprises everyone, Agent Coulson is the last one back on board the Bus.

Melinda and Ward are cleaning their guns in the living area in some sort of spy bonding exercise and Skye is trying to actually finish a goddamn book for once, when Coulson walks in, dragging a suitcase behind him, looking a lot like a man who was just emotionally punched in the face.

“Woah, AC, you okay?” Skye asks before she can stop herself.

“Oh, you know,” Coulson says airily, which isn’t how Coulson speaks at all, “family.” And then he proceeds to show that he can out robot Ward and out bland Melinda any day of the week by pasting on his most aggressively pleasant face and asking about everyone else’s shore leave.

“That was weird, right?” Skye asks when Coulson’s moved on to unpack his eight thousand grey suits. “We’re sure he’s not some crappy clone version right?”

“He’s fine, Skye, leave it,” Ward says with his normal level of people skills. Melinda, however, she looks kind of worried.

Skye feels compelled to ask. “We can’t clone people, can we?”

Melinda doesn’t frown but it’s something close. “No, Skye, we can’t.”

This does not comfort Skye in the slightest.

 

***

 

“Maybe he’s a fembot,” Skye guesses.

Fitz and Simmons look up from their work to make eerily similar disapproving faces at her. She’s perched on the only available counter space she could find in their lab, taking a yogurt break from Ward and even the thought of physical activity. Really, Skye’s amazed that the science twins have let her stay this long at all.

“Fembots aren’t real,” Simmons tells Skye seriously.

“Although the implications of one would be fascinating,” Fitz adds. “Creating the right skin texture along with the correct resistance of all the parts of the human body would be difficult enough. They’d need to be spot on, really, with a fembot.”

“You know,” Simmons says, lighting up, “with the technology that was used against Agent Amador, you could potentially hijack a human woman instead of creating an android.”

“I don’t actually think Agent Coulson’s a fembot,” Skye interrupts for her own sanity. “For one thing, he doesn’t have the rack for it.” Fitz and Simmons actually pause to consider this and then, because they must have been raised wrong, they both look a little put out by it.

“Maybe he just misses his family,” Simmons guesses. “This hasn’t exactly been an easy assignment.”

Skye frowns into her yogurt cup. It’s not that Simmons is wrong, it’s just that Skye doesn’t think that she’s right, either.

 

***

 

After Iowa, she notices that Coulson doesn’t wear a wedding ring. It makes her wonder.

“Is it a confidentiality thing?” Skye asks Ward. “Like, if I get hitched one day, am I gonna have to pass on the big sparkly ring?”

Ward makes a face like he clearly thinks that sparkly rings are girly and dumb. “Only on a covert mission. You can wear jewelry for most field operations as long as it is unobtrusive and won’t attract attention or snag on the gear.”

“So no giant sparkler then.”

“No sparkler,” Ward agrees. “But a wedding band would be fine.”

Coulson doesn’t wear a wedding band and he never goes on covert missions. She wonders if there’s an Ex Mrs. Coulson out there, which would probably why he’s living in a flying man cave and drives a shiny red car. Or maybe there was never anyone. Either way, Skye thinks it’s pretty sad to have no one and the team you picked yourself still knows nothing about you.

 

***

 

Sometimes, when Skye’s holed herself up in the SUV with her laptop and her fading sense of self-entitlement, Coulson sits in the passenger seat and pulls out his seriously battered, somehow still working, first edition kindle and just, like, _chills_ with her.

“You don’t have to babysit me, you know,” she asks one day, kicking him gently in the thigh. “I’m not going to turn to the dark side or anything if I’m left alone.”

“I know.” Coulson smiles at her kindly, which is the only way he ever smiles. “I can leave, if you’d like.”

Coulson is always so polite, Skye thinks, even when he’s ripping her a new one for being an inconsiderate, selfish asshole. And he always listens. And suddenly Skye feels like the world’s biggest jerk for kicking Coulson out or making him feel unwanted or something.

“It’s cool, dude,” she tells him quickly, ignoring his _please don’t call me that_. “I just wanted to make sure you weren’t, like, being held hostage by your polite Midwestern sensibilities or anything.”

He frowns properly now. “How do you know I’m from the Midwest?”

“Two weeks shore leave in Iowa? Please, that wasn’t even subtle, AC.”

Coulson’s smile is still small and polite, but there is something behind his eyes she can’t quite parse. “We’ll make an agent of you yet,” he tells her before picking up his kindle and not quite meeting her eye for the rest of the day.

 

 ***

 

“What was Coulson like before?” Skye wonders aloud one day. Melinda and Ward are trying to teach her something complicated and painful that they both swear is super useful in the field. So far all it’s done is give her some pretty interesting blisters. “Before his midlife crisis.”

Ward roughly adjusts Skye’s shoulders. “Agent Coulson isn’t having a midlife crisis, now focus. You might need this.” Skye mostly ignores him because her high school math teacher swore she’d need to be able to find the volume of a cone, too. She does fix her shoulders, however.

“He didn’t used to be so forgiving,” Melinda says, thoughtful. “But getting stabbed through the heart can change a guy.”

Skye supposes that is true, but it’s not exactly what she wants to know. She wants to know what missions Coulson was put on before and if he always collected strays and why he looks at his phone wistfully, sometimes, sitting in the dark of the backseat of the SUV with Skye. It’s not that she _has_ to know these things, the way she has to know what happened to her parents or if Ward is a real boy underneath the layers of issues and government issued spy skills. It’s that Coulson is a good guy and he looks after his team and, well, you want to know things about your friends, right?

“Tahiti is a magical place,” Skye parrots back, tone light, and Melinda’s face shifts from neutral to carefully blank.

“It sure is,” she agrees before letting Ward get back to teaching Skye another life skill she’s probably going to need sooner rather than later.

 

***

 

There are Doom Bots in New York City.

“I’m sorry, Coulson, but you’re just going to have to miss it,” comes a stern female voice over the bus’s loudspeakers. “The mission can wait. Your official orders are to stand down.”

“They won’t even notice I’m there,” argues Coulson, looking as angry as he did when he thought Skye betrayed them. “Everyone’s going to be focused on the Doom Bots, Maria. It’s the perfect cover.”

Skye may not be able to see Maria’s face, but she can recognize that _goddamn Coulson_ sigh anywhere. “It’s too much of a risk. Stand down, Coulson. That’s an order.”

“Understood,” Coulson grits out, jabbing at the button to end communication. Everyone looks at each other, like they’re all waiting for Coulson to say, _well, she didn’t say anything about Hoboken_. But Coulson doesn’t say anything at all. He just grips the edge of the table, knuckles turning white, and takes three deep, even breaths like he’s trying to count to ten.

“You heard her then,” he says at last, head down but voice clear. “Until the Avengers wrangle to Doom Bots, we’re on standby.” Coulson lifts his head and takes a step back from the table, seemingly regaining his composure. “Melinda, Ward, I need you two monitoring the situation. We’re going to move in as soon as Hill sends the all clear. I want to know what’s happening on the ground and if DeMarco’s going to try and make a run for it.”

“Happening on the ground with our guy?” Melinda asks. “Or the Avengers?”

Coulson frowns at her, but it’s not his usual disappointment that people have motives other than country and loyalty. Instead, he looks upset that Melinda can see through his government spook facade like she wasn’t issued her very own. “Just do your job, Melinda, and wait for the all clear.”

Even Skye knows that there is no fighting Coulson on this. That whatever is going on is not something this Bus was designed to handle. And Melinda is a whole heck of a lot better at spying and understanding Phil Coulson than Skye is, so it’s not surprising when she just nods, “Sir,” but it is a little disappointing.

 

***

 

Coulson spends the entire Doom Bot attack on New York City in his office, door closed. Skye spends it with Fitz and Simmons, glued to the TV, watching places that she’s known and loved be artfully smashed.

“It’s probably just difficult,” Simmons rationalizes. “The last time anything like this happened, he was right in the thick of it, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Skye agrees, “and it got him stabbed.”

“If something’s going on he should tell us,” Fitz says, eyeing the staircase Coulson disappeared up an hour ago. “We’re supposed to look after each other, aren’t we?”

On TV the Hulk smashes the Doom Bot that was about to take out Skye’s favorite noodle shop, and she can’t stop from doing a little victory cheer. “I think Coulson looks after us,” Skye says once the camera angle shifts to the skyline, Hawkeye picking off Doom Bots as they chase Iron Man through the sky.

“He does look after us,” Simmons begins.

“But who looks after him?” Fitz finishes.

That, Skye figures, is the million-dollar question.

 

***

 

The million-dollar question does not get answered once the Doom Bots finally clear and everyone on the Bus can get to work. And it doesn’t get answered on the handful of missions after that. It’s like Coulson’s had a personality reboot, and all of the Doom Bot angst has been wiped from his bones. He makes terrible jokes on missions and lets everyone fuck up just enough to learn before stepping in to save the day.

Sometimes he sits with Skye and sometimes he looks at his cell phone a little wistfully and sometimes he comes up with increasingly terrible reasons not to spar with Melinda.

“I think I threw out my shoulder during that last op,” he says, not even bothering to rub at his fake injury. “Doctors don’t want me exerting myself too much.” It’s an open secret that the doctors didn’t even want Coulson back in the field yet. The shoulder thing is just adding insult to injury.

“And since when did you ever listen to doctors?” Melinda asks.

“You die for eight seconds,” Coulson tells her, smile playing at the corners of his mouth, “and then tell me how you feel about doctors.”

“Wasn’t that what Tahiti was for?”

“It’s a magical place,” Coulson agrees, picking up his papers. “Teach the kid how to spar. I think Ward’s going soft on her.”

Skye books it to her bunk so fast she thinks she might have pulled something.

 

***

 

“Oh no,” Fitz says, and that’s never a good sign.

It’s even worse when Simmons echoes, “This is not good. It looks like we were right.”

“About what?” Ward asks, peering at computer screens he doesn’t understand in the slightest. Skye’s a computer whiz and even she doesn’t understand this stuff, it’s written so heavily in super-geek-eeze.

“Well the good news is,” Simmons says, her voice an octave too high to be cheerful, “that we were right and fembots are definitely a possibility.”

“And the bad news?” Ward grits out, clearly wanting to ask about why fembots were ever a question but also obviously not wanting the answer.

“These ones are going to be a little less personable,” Fitz says, looking more than a little put out. “But they’re at least completely synthetic instead of a human-robot hybrid.”

“So we don’t have to worry about another potential Agent Amador situation,” Simmons adds.

Fitz grimaces. “Maybe.”

Simmons considers this before grimacing as well. “Maybe,” she agrees.

Ward looks like he’s about three seconds away from bursting a stress ulcer, so Skye takes pity on him. “Are you saying this guy’s creating an army of fembots?”

“More or less,” Fitz says, looking sheepish, at the same time Simmons answers, “Yes, probably.”

It’s enough to make Ward lose all pretenses of professionalism and actually hide his head in his hands. “I am not explaining this to Agent Coulson,” he tells them, voice muffled by his hands and his probably overwhelming levels of despair.

Skye doesn’t know what he’s complaining about. Fembots are totally awesome.

 

***

 

Fembots are not totally awesome.

Coulson goes tight lipped and stony faced as soon as the potential android army gets mentioned, losing all pretenses of being a pretty chill dude underneath all the boring suit stuff and terrifying spy stuff. There are a couple closed door meetings where Coulson yells at Melinda and he yells at Ward and he yells at some people back at SHIELD HQ, all while Skye, Fitz, and Simmons sit in the common room, huddled together like a couple of kids caught between their parents in the divorce.

When Coulson finally emerges, Ward and Melinda trailing behind looking a little worse for the wear, he’s apparently got his head back in the game. There’s no time for sulking or wondering why fembots are the thing that push Coulson over the edge.

There’s a job to do, and Skye can get behind that.

 

***

 

The other reason that fembots are terrible is that they punch. Really hard. Or at least it looks that way from the van, where Skye is stuck with the science twins.

“Can we use an EMP?” Skye asks, desperately trying to come up with an answer.

“No,” Coulson’s voice comes over the comms. On the monitors, Skye can see that he has a cut over his eye and he’s favoring his right leg.

“It might be our only shot,” says Simmons, pulling up something on her computer. “If we just—”

One of the fembots puts Ward in a chokehold and everyone on the van holds their breath.

“I repeat,” Coulson tells them, limping towards Melinda, obviously trying not to catch the robots’ attention, “no EMPs.”

“Well unless we have our own fembot army, then you’re just going to have to retreat,” Fitz snaps, never good under pressure. “Or,” he brightens, “if we just had a monkey we could—”

Simmons snaps, “Fitz!” at the same time that Coulson straightens up, right leg suddenly fine.

“Is it the only way?” he asks, voice cold and calm, and Fitz just stammers out, “Yes, sir,” clearly picking up on the intense vibe of what-the-fuckery coming from the monitors.

“Okay,” Coulson tells them, sounding determined.

And then Coulson punches the nearest fembot in the face.

 

***

 

It’s sort of hard to follow what happens next because Coulson moves faster than the fembots could ever dream. But the punch line is easy to follow—there were four fembots and now there are none. The head of the one Coulson punched rolls on the floor, circuits sparking from her neck. Two more have somehow been powered down. The fourth, the one who had Ward’s head in her arms looking like she was going to crack him open, well, she has a pretty large hole through her torso where Coulson just _ripped through her_.

There are scorch marks from electrical burns everywhere and bullet casings all over the floor. Coulson fixes his tie and holds out a hand to help Melinda up. The cut on his lip is gone, healed, just like all of the fembots’ bullet wounds.

“You’ve been holding back on us,” Melinda says, eyeing the damage.

“Tahiti was a magical place.” Coulson shrugs and wipes some of the soot off his suit. “You okay, Ward?”

Ward’s throat is red, ugly purple bruises just beginning to show. “Nothing a shower can’t fix. You going to tell us what happened, sir?”

Coulson nudges at one of the fembots with the toe of his shiny loafer. “Help me load these onto the Bus and I’ll see what I can do.”

 

***

 

Except, of course, Coulson refuses to actually talk about it. “Not until we get to New York,” he says. “I want Hill and Director Fury to be there for this.”

Melinda tries to fight it until Deputy Director Hill calls the Bus herself. “You get your ass back to New York, Phil, or I will not be held responsible for what Fury does next.”

There is nothing to do but sit back and wait.

 

***

 

Simmons slows down the video footage and they all sit around in the lab, no one breathing, watching Coulson move impossibly fast.

“Are you saying Coulson’s a fembot?” Ward asks, sounding pretty skeptical for a guy that just watched his boss literally punch a robot’s head off.

“Obviously not,” Simmons scoffs.

“Fembots are female,” Fitz explains, as though Ward were being particularly slow. “Coulson would be an android.”

“That would explain getting knifed through the heart and surviving,” Skye muses.

On the screen in the lab, video footage running at fraction of its original speed, Melinda and Ward are frozen in place watching Coulson calmly rips through the torso of a robotic woman. Skye wonders what else there is to know.

 

***

 

They reach New York in record time. Maria Hill and Nick Fury are standing on the tarmac waiting for them. Skye’s only seen Fury once, when Coulson was giving him a tour of the freshly damaged Bus. He’s even more intimidating now, all traces of humor gone from his face.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” Fury greets as soon as Coulson steps off the bus.

“Do you really want to do this here?” Coulson asks. “Because I don’t think you’re going to like my answer.”

Fury scowls, crosses his arms across his chest. “Inside, conference room four. Now.”

For some reason, Skye doesn’t really think that this is going to go any better indoors.

 

***

 

“How long have you known?” asks Hill, once the door to the conference room is securely locked. The room’s taken up by a giant table with an impressively large screen covering the far wall. There aren’t any windows and Skye has the sinking suspicion that the room is soundproofed. Goddamn SHIELD and their boner for utmost secrecy.

“Since I woke up,” says Coulson, taking a seat. Fury and Hill stand at the head of the table, like maybe they can control this situation by virtue of pretending that they’re still in control. Skye huddles with Ward and the rest of the team along the back wall.

“ _How_?” Fury demands.

“I _died_ , Nick,” Coulson says, voice eerily calm. “Loki stabbed me through the heart and I bled out against a wall and when I woke up, you told me that we’d won and I’d lived. But you know what didn’t make sense? I was in Tahiti and Clint wasn’t there.”

“You signed a nondisclosure when you signed up. We get to kill you.”

“And I signed B-32A. Clint gets to know,” Coulson argues.

“Do we get to know?” Melinda asks, three pairs of eyes snapping to her. She’s standing at parade rest, jaw set, looking coolly determined. Skye sort of loves her. “You took down four gynoids with your bare hands, sir. And Akila said that SHIELD had done something to you, but she didn’t say what. That’s all we know, and as your team, I think we’re entitled to know more.”

Fury is looking at Melinda like she took a shit in his coffee. “Classified,” he barks.

“Sir, I think our cover’s blown. At least tell his team,” Maria says. She’s looking at Phil though, face softer than it had been every other time Skye’s seen it, tired and severe on one of the Bus’s screens.

Fury turns to Hill like he’s about to yell some more, but Coulson ruins his fun by saying, “My real body’s in Tahiti on life support. This is just a Life Model Decoy. Sorry.”

He smiles at them sadly, and Skye can’t help but think they’re not the ones who are owed an apology.

 

***

 

There’s not much more to say after that. Fury just says, “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Sorry, Phil,” before stomping out of the room. It’s a pretty shitty apology if you ask Skye, but Coulson seems okay with it.

Hill promises to give Coulson access to his files and his body. She has Fitz and Simmons briefed on the tech just in case anything goes wonky on the field. “We didn’t know how to tell you, Phil. We weren’t sure you’d want to know.” Her apology sounds a thousand times more sincere than Fury’s

“This doesn’t change anything,” Coulson says to Skye and Ward and Melinda and Fitz and Simmons, his team, who he has protected and lied to and taken care of. “It just means that we might get to work with the Avengers once in a while.” He smiles a little, pleased with himself, and Maria opens her mouth to protest but Coulson just raises an eyebrow at her. “Clint knows I’m alive, so they all do. It’s a miracle they’ve kept Stark quiet this long.”

Maria sighs, defeated. “Just don’t piss off any gods again. I’m not sure we can bring you back a second time.”

 

***

 

They stay in New York for a week and it’s like nothing and everything has changed

“I think we could all use a little vacation. You guys just found out your boss is an android,” Coulson explains before vanishing into the city.

“Is there anything about that guy that isn’t a secret?” Skye asks, feeling a bit off kilter. She doesn’t know what she would do if she were killed and brought back to life in robot form. She’s not sure she would take it quite as well.

“Oh, I don’t know,” says Melinda. “He didn’t used to be this open.”

“I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not,” Ward says, looking adorably confused.

“Coulson’s dead and my boss is a robot zombie. It’s a brave new world.” Melinda pats Ward on the back, but Ward doesn’t look at all comforted. “He’s our boss; he doesn’t have to be an open book. As far as I’m concerned, nothing’s changed.”

“It’s still Coulson,” Simmons pipes up, scrolling through the specs given to her by Maria. “According to this, his body’s being held in stasis and his mind is projected through the LMD. That’s still him, just not his original body.”

Fitz shudders. “It’s all a little too Frankenstein’s monster for my liking. But he doesn’t seem to mind it.”

“He can punch the head off a fembot. I wouldn’t mind either,” Skye decides.

Simmons laughs and Fitz sighs. “I wish he would have just told us, though,” and Ward and Melinda share a mysterious look, so maybe things haven’t really changed all that much at all.

 

***

 

(Coulson comes back from a week away and says, “Are we all better now? Can we forget this ever happened?”

Skye smiles, happy with her week in New York spent with her team, who are now her friends. “That depends, you ever going to tell us that you’re banging Clint Barton?”

He doesn’t blush, but Skye suspects that’s something Coulson just doesn’t do. “I think one deeply personal revelation’s enough, don’t you?”

And Skye just laughs, because maybe he does have a point.)


End file.
